Key Words Rant

[crazygracieuk]

My youngest is in Reception.

At our school they get a variety of reading schemes as their reading book which is good and key words to learn.

Key words are sent home in groups of 10 and the teacher sends home another set once they are mastered.

The problem that I have is, the teacher does not consider the words to be mastered if the child sounds it out. I think that's crazy. As an adult I scan all letters in a word before saying it out loud which is surely a form of sounding things out?

Ds is at pink level reading so (quite rightly!) sounds out most words. According to the teacher he's supposed to recognise the word based on it's "shape" .

My motivation in complaining is that ds is getting discouraged and thinks that he's not a good reader as the teacher has sent home the same key words for the last 2 months and he likes to practice them.

AIBU to think that it's perfectly ok to sound out keywords?

!) None of my children have been sent home words to learn,heaven knows how they have learnt to read,

2. All 3 of the sentences mrz posted were easy to read.

With regards to the 'jumbled sentences' it is an internet meme, not genuine research, and is examined by a (genuine) Cambridge researcher HERE Most of the jumbled sentences are very easy to read because we are all skilled readers and are pretty good at anagrams (I used to do loads of 'jumbled word' puzzles when I was a child). Extrapolating from what skilled readers do that this is how children learn to read is what has led us all into bother in the first place.

The 'Whole Word'/Look & Say method of teaching reading was based on the premis that as skilled readers just 'looked' at words and knew them instantly then children could learn to look at words as 'wholes' without any need to look at the letters within them (in fact, one of the most respected, but utterly dottiest, gurus of 'Whole Language', Frank Smith, doesn't believe that letters have any relevance at all to reading. I own, and have read, one of his seminal works, and can vouch for this).

As children find it virtually impossible to learn a useful number of words as 'wholes' the teaching of 'High Frequency Words' be came an important weapon in the 'Whole Word' teacher's armoury; it at least guaranteed that children would be able to read something. What appears to be completely unnoticed by the adherents of HFWs is the fact that if you remove everything except HFWs from a text, the text is just about meaningless. Yet these words have been elevated to the apparent equivalent of a sacred text, with most of the population apparently believing that they have a unique and undecodeable status and that no child will ever learn to read without knowing them. Which is absolute rubbish.

In my job I find them to be a curse. Not only have children wasted a large part of 6 years of primary education in the futile task of learning to 'read and spell the 45 YR/1 HFWs' (for very few struggling readers get much further) but the opportunity for them to get absolutely vital practice in decoding and blending is severely curtailed by the HFW obsession.

It is, believe it or not, perfectly easy to teach children to read without a HFW in sight in the initial stages. It is also less risky as the flash card/guess from context methods are very damaging to children who are slower to learn. I'd far rather children knew their letter/sound correspondences than their HFWs...

I still don't seem to be able to discover if evolucy is a teacher. She's being very coy

MaizieD - I completely agree about learning just the HFW and that without any other words they don't mean a lot, that is why I believe that when they are being taught it should be weLl structured around simple books that include them and this can help if children are struggling. They can see them in use in context and help to remember them.
They are useful words but you are right why single them out to read from cards? Why not ensure children read plenty of books with them in with other simple decodable words.

Excellent and illuminating post, MaizieD
High Frequency words seem to be the last resort of teachers who are clueless and ed.psychs and Sencos who don't understand just how dispiriting it is for a child to come back week after week with the same wretched set of words. And all because their teacher doesn't know how to teach children to read.

I agree that many of us learnt to read without the emphasis on phonics teaching. However, what children taught this way have done is to learn the code in retrospect, and to use it to read words which were at first unfamiliar. ie By learning a few words by sight, it is then possible for children to deconstruct those words to find the phonetic code and then apply that knowledge to new words. Explicitly teaching phonics gives children a head start on this. I believe everybody uses phonic knowledge in part in their reading, even as an adult we constantly come across new words and they can't be decoded without complex knowledge of how letters make sounds.

Thanks for the posts this thread. Some of the posts have been really interesting. As a keen reader and bilingual person , I am very interested in how it all works and from having older children I know how much other subjects become if the child can read.

Last night I challenged ds to read his flashcards without sounding out. He got most of the words right so I suspect that the teacher isn't changing his words because nobody has ever told him (or me!) not to sound out his keywords.

Last question- are HFW/Tricky Words/Key Words the same thing ??

Mst ppl wll b abl t rd ths pst. Wrd shps dffrnt bt key snds same. We do sound out without thinking

crazygracieuk, HFWs are exactly what it says, the most frequently used words in English language. They have sometimes been called key words. The term tricky words tends to refer to common words with less common spellings, eg said, was, are, etc. Most HFWs, eg it, that, in, etc, are not tricky.

"I completely agree about learning just the HFW and that without any other words they don't mean a lot, that is why I believe that when they are being taught it should be weLl structured around simple books that include them"

I'm afraid you have rather missed my point, evolucy. There is no need to focus on these words at all. Most of them are completely decodable if taught in the right place in the phonics sequence and it is actually possible to write early decodable text either without using them or keeping their use to a minimum. The real problem arises with the 'old', Look & Say, reading schemes, such as the Blessed ORT, which have been purposely written to include many repetitions of the HFWs in order to support Whole Word teaching of reading.

While schools persist in using these schemes for early reading practice the importance of knowing the HFWs will continue to be exagerated and their mythic status remain hardly challenged (except by me, of course )

Thanks CecilyP

The school are sending home key words rather than tricky words. I'd prefer they sent home tricky words as he can usually decode the ones spelt phonetically.

maizieD..I did not think that I had missed your point, I understood that you feel that the HFW should not be singled out. I am referring to the fact that they are, and therefore would it be best to try and learn them with other words so they do make sense alongside phonics work of course.
I am not really commenting whether I think that they should or should not be singled out, but as they are I feel that it is helpful to look at different ways for children to learn them, especially if they are struggling with it.

Many English words can't be sounded out (said, was, touch, through, people). The sounding out is only the beginning of learning to read.

I have just summarised at
literacyinthenews.blogspot.com/ what learning to read and write English involves.

I will go into more detail just for learning to read next.

I was wondering when Mashabell would join this thread.

Sometimes feels like all threads on reading end up with a few of the same posters posting .

'I will go into more detail just for learning to read next'

Please spare us, Masha, but do tell us how many children you've actually taught how to read -not including your own children and grandchildren.

she meant on the blog, maverick, not on here.

Phew!

I thought she meant here too.

I think she does mean here... [runs screaming from the room smilie]

e.g were, here, where, they all have the same last 3 letters, and you can sound out the 'w' 'h' and 'wh' but the 'ere' is different in each one.
Children are taught that the same grapheme (combination of letters) can represent different sounds and are even from reception are quite capable of working out which one ... think in reception they are taught "c" as in cat and "k" as in kite and "ck" as in pack and "th" as in that and "th" as in feather ... in Y1 they are taught the sound/w/ can be written "w" or "wh" and /er/ can be written "er" "ir" "ur" "ere" and /air/ can be written "air" "are" "ear" "ere" and /ear/ can be written "ear" "ier" "ere"

Perhaps I have missed something but I cannot see it. And how do you explain 'here' and 'hear', they are not spelt the same but they sound the same.^
In Y2 they are taught what homophones are.

Masha even my 6 year olds can tell you that "a" following a "w" often represents /o/
the only thing you have said that I agree with is that learning to decode is the beginning of learning to read.

mrz...look I am well aware of all the different sounds that the same letters can make, but that is exactly my point the rules can be different for the same letters. Children have to work out which one it is, they cannot just sound it out simply, they have to know rules of different sounds before doing so, and actually they would need to know the word to know which one it is. I would have thought that while obviously the rules are important to know for reading new words, for a word such as 'here' for example it is probably quite easy to learn the word without complicated rules. You said that there were only seven words in the whole of the English language that couldn't be sounded out, which is rubbish in my view. Perhaps we have different views about 'sounding out' but I would not say a word can be sounded out if you have to learn several rules about how the same letters can sound very different, they are then the tricky words, those that can be partly sounded out and have a tricky bit, such as the words we have mentioned here.
I have a 3 and 4 year old, my 4 year old works with Y1 for guiding reading and spelling tests amongst other things, my 3 year old knows all Reception HFW and reads simple books, I am well aware of the capabilities of children to learn at this age.

Which is why some words are "tricky" for four year olds but not "tricky" for five year olds and as there are 150+ graphemes in English and 250000 words it is more sensible to teach the graphemes than it is to teach lists of hundreds of words.

That is all true, but the fact remains that there are more than seven words that cannot easily be sounded out, i.e, there are several ways of interpreting the letters. You made that statement and I disagree.

But good phonics teaching is all about teaching how to decode the letters, evolucy. I think most teachers would also disagree with you regarding the ease of sounding out.

As in anything with alternatives children "try" the various sounds and work it out very quickly sounding out the words correctly.